We Better Stop Playing Politics With Star Wars

COMMENTARY

February 13, 1987|By R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR., King Features Syndicate

Ours is a very curious political culture. The author Garry Wills heaves up a fantasy on the life of Ronald Reagan, Reagan`s America: Innocents at Home, wherein not one paragraph is exempt from inaccuracy, and he is acclaimed a ``philosopher.`` Well, I suppose he is. Not in the sense that Plato or Aristotle were philosophers, but in the modern sense of the philosopher, that is to say, the thinker who gathers up facts and vaporizes them into a lovely dithyramb of pompous carping.

Some vague purpose is served here, but by the time all the painful intellection has been perpetrated who knows what that purpose might be? Wills` immediate purpose is to render Ronald Reagan unseemly, but the arduous erudition and argumentation that he lugs onto center stage suggest that he has set his sights on the immensities: a world without flags, the salvation of man, a Bill of Rights for laboratory animals. Who knows?

By the time Dr. Wills had typed out his last sophistic paragraph I am sure even he was woozy as to what he had wrought other than an urgent need to confront his bartender -- and quick. Once again the philosopher has befuddled himself.

This sort of idiot philosophizing goes on all the time. Certainly many of the opponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, find themselves so engaged. All are ardent opponents of nuclear holocaust. They have marshaled stupendous evidence and analyses to sink SDI into mortal doubt. In the end their fears of nuclear holocaust are replaced by dread of a shield against it. In all the decades of the nuclear age only SDI has offered a plausible alternative to nuclear nightmare, but SDI`s critics have become philosophers along with Dr. Wills. In matters of security they trust in the Politburo`s promises rather than in the promise of American technology.

From that day in 1983 when the president first suggested SDI research these critics have been busily gathering up the facts and vaporizing them, turning the Soviets` vast SDI research and deployment programs into no programs, their vast arms buildup into no buildup, their violations of the 1972 ABM treaty into nothing at all.

Truth be known, the Soviets have spent $150 billion on SDI research and testing over the past 10 years, 15 times more than the United States. They have deployed a combination of ABMs and air defenses that give them at least a light shield for the entire Soviet Union. Their arms buildup has been equally prodigious.

The Central Intelligence Agency`s 1985 National Intelligence Estimate, 11-3-885, reveals that this buildup may have ended the nuclear stalemate that SDI`s critics prefer to the assured security of strategic defense. According to that NIE assessment the Soviet warhead arsenal has grown from 6,000 in 1978 to 12,000 in 1985 and will reach 20,000 by 1990. Finally the Soviets` breaches of their ABM obligations extend the gamut from tricky questions of missile capacity to the blatancy of their Krasnoyarsk radar.

All this and more has no objective reality for the critics. Nor does the fact that SDI answers their oft-repeated hopes for peace. Through advanced technologies our strategic defenses and eventually our entire nation will be secured from nuclear holocaust. Neither a Soviet strike nor the assault of some Third World fanatic as yet unknown will menace us. In an age in which scientific advance is looked to to resolve such diverse problems as AIDS and sluggish productivity, SDI`s critics have abandoned all hope that science might save us from nuclear missiles. It is a curious flight from their usual faith in science.

Only the malign influence of politics can explain it. Had SDI been thumped for originally by the left rather than by the right one can imagine all true- blue progressives coming out for it lustily and all true-blue conservatives viewing it with the utmost suspicion -- such is the gruesome condition of our politics.

According to SDI strategists such as Robert Jastrow the United States has perhaps five years to shield itself from the Soviet combination of offensive weaponry and strategic defenses. Within that time such diverse sources as the Pentagon and deliberative groups convened by the George C. Marshall Institute argue that a defense of several layers can be constructed to protect our deterrent force and parts of our population. The hour for doing so is now.